Rants

I just don’t understand Paul Thurrott. Although I now prefer Apple’s products, I occasionally visit his site because I’m still vaguely interested in the latest news from Microsoft. Much of what Paul writes is balanced and fair, but sometimes he comes out with some complete tosh!

I’ve just been reading a hilarious review over at Engadget of the installation process for the software that comes with Microsoft’s new Zune device. Apart from the fact that the software clearly isn’t finished and has a high stinkage factor, what caught my eye was some of the language used in the screens.

You may have read recently that Dell have had to recall four million laptop batteries made by Sony because a few of them exploded. Well it turns out that Apple have been affected too and have initiated their own recall programme. As soon as a heard this news I knew straight away that my PowerBook would have the problem.

A few weeks ago I finally got around to getting broadband Internet access at home after procrastinating for a few years in the face of a bewildering amount of choice and uncertainty over technical options.

It looks like the silly season is upon us again. Respected PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak writes about Windows' security problems and implores Microsoft to spend some of its billions of dollars on fixing its software.

What the blazes is going on with software version numbers? Sun have just announced that the next version of Java is going to be branded as Java 5 and not Java 2. So instead of J2SE 1.5 and J2EE 1.5—I'm ignoring the Micro Edition because my mobile phone doesn't have a JVM—we're going to have J2SE 5 and J2EE 5.

Although occupationally I currently write code for J2EE 1.3, the other week I needed to install the J2SE 1.4 JDK and this led me to discover an interesting difference in the Javadoc documentation program between the two versions.

I had a snail-mail letter from my ISP last week trumpeting the fact that they're changing their name from Freeserve to Wanadoo. Apparently they wanted me to be one of the first to know, although they must have felt the same way about my partner too, for two such letters were received in this household and millions more were doubtless in the same situation throughout the country.

Many websites invite their users to visit a regional version of the main site, but unfortunately few seem to manage to get the localization right. I recently had to renew my Norton AntiVirus subscription and I was directed the European Symantec site, where I was confronted with a classic example of poor localization.

The problem of what to do about the browser Back button has reared its ugly head again. Actually it's never really gone away, it's just gone out of focus because other issues have come up and because it appears intractable.

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to make people distrust a particular piece of software, it's when it trashes their data. I've often heard users complain of losing data whilst using Microsoft Office. I can't recall ever having had that particular pleasure, but today I did lose an afternoon's work because of using Oracle software.

One of the things that really annoys me is when people ask questions and then disappear off the face of the Earth. During the nine months that this site has been running, I've received a number of technical questions either as comments or via my Contact page.

Technology promises so much but often all it delivers is frustration at its failings. I've been in contact with my bank—Lloyds TSB, should you want to avoid them—for nearly a third of a year now regarding a bill payment I made to a water company using Internet banking.